Allusions to DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, Patrick McGoohan's THE PRISONER, Kafka, Orwell, and Mordor

 

Dear Anonymous Google Accuser:

 

Thank you for your note, the contents of which sound much like the block warden’s caution (“Your attitude is noticed, comrade.”) to Yuri in the film version of Doctor Zhivago.

 

I have re-read the column, which I wrote nine years ago, and find nothing offensive in it (although it is rather puerile), nor do you detail exactly what is offensive in it and why I should be sanctioned. You are being Kafka-esque, and I say this as someone who has read Kafka: you do not tell me what offense I have purportedly committed nor do you face me with an accuser. You do not even face me with you, for you do not give your name. You employ the passive voice in referring to an “Adult Content policy” and to “Community Guidelines,” which sounds like something from an episode of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner: “The Committee won’t like this, Number Six.”

 

Google (and one could find “google” offensive, with its history mocking someone’s physical characteristics) is a private company, and so is free to publish or not publish, as is only right.  And I am free to pity Google for moral, ethical, and literary cowardice.

 

I was raised in situational poverty, barely graduated from high school, and spent 18 months in Viet-Nam. Upon returning to the USA (with life-long skin cancer which the DVA denies) I worked straight nights (double shifts on weekends) as an ambulance driver and later an LVN to put myself through university. I taught for almost forty years in public school, community college, and university as an adjunct instructor of no status whatsoever. In retirement I volunteered with our local school’s reading program until the Covid ended that, and I still volunteer with the lads at the local prison. I volunteer in community cleanup after our hurricanes (tho’ I’m getting a little old for that). I’ve worked hard all my life, paid my taxes, paid off my house at age 70, receive only half of my Social Security because of some vague law, and never gamed the system. Indeed, I would say that the system has gamed me.

 

And was all of this so that some frightened committee of anonymous inquisitors staring at an Orwellian telescreen or a Mordor-ish Palantir could find an innocuous scribble insensitive?

 

Pffffft.

 

Sincerely,

 

Lawrence Hall

 

 

A Brief Review of Tolkien's THE FALL OF ARTHUR

The Fall of Arthur.  J.R.R. Tolkien.  Ed. Christopher Tolkien.  Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York.  2013.

This book contains the text of Tolkien’s unfinished The Fall of Arthur in four cantos and part of a fifth, running to about forty pages of Anglo-Saxon meter and mostly in modern English garnished with a few charming archaisms. 

The poem is delightful, and will appeal to Hobbit-istas and to those who enjoy Beowulf, “The Seafarer” and other Anglo-Saxon poems in translations that keep the A/S form with its four-beat line, alliteration, and kennings, and Arthurian tales and topics.

The rest of the book, over 170 pages, consists of detailed essays in what-is-this-about detail by Christopher Tolkien, and a singularly unhelpful appendix not explaining Old English verse.  Tolkien minor never uses one word when he can throw in ten, and the (to me) strained connections between the poem and Middle-Earth are obscure; this material is for the true Hobbit-ista.

The Fall of Arthur, the poem, is really good, and I will re-read it and mark the more of the allusions and obscure words far more than I did in my first, hasty reading.  A clearer and much briefer explanation of Anglo-Saxon verse for those, like me, who did not pay attention in high school senior English would have been useful, and the turbid essays and the Hobbitry could have left out, resulting in a smaller, more pocketable vade mecum (cf. Everyman’s Pocket Poet series).